Side Effects Of Social Media Addiction

December 15, 2018

Social media in present world is providing many exciting opportunities to the mankind in every field, be it education, social life, profession or business. Things which were not possible in a distributed world are damn easy in a connected life. Thanks to laptops, tablets and mobiles, people are never alone. A significant part of our time is being spent over social media these days. When spent judiciously over social media, the time can reap unseen values, but when it becomes an addiction, it brings undesired results.

These days, mobiles and social media have become an addiction, and along with elderly and adults, kids even teens are falling prey. People are continuously staring at screens, hours together. This is in all means impacting work, relationships, quality of life and health. I am presenting 5 crucial social media addiction impacts which are slowly and steadily ruining your personal lives.

Person browsing through social media over phone

1. Negative impact over personal advancement: Youths are consistently online over social media for hours, every day. In a discussion with 65 parents with young kids, I found 27 parents complaining about 3+ hours being spent by the kids online, and around 16 parents complaining their kids spending 4+ hours online in a day. This is impacting the learning curve and advancement opportunities. 3 or 4 hours of everyday time being wasted over social media, without any output, deprives youth of learning and personal grooming opportunities.

2. Vulnerability to the darker internet: Internet is just not as beautiful as it seems. It is flooded with anti-social and anti-civic elements prying over you, specially youths. Youth all over the world is being targeted and provoked on religious, cultural political and such other subjects and mentally forced to enter crime. The darker side of internet is also trying to destabilize economies and lives of people, by continuously pumping in false information, rumors, self-harming games, sexual and drug abuse. Youths who are online most of the time are more prone to get trapped.

3. Privacy leaks: Continuous sharing of location information, personal photographs, places visited, expression of feelings and every single such information shared is being collated online and impacting your privacy. In general, no one reads through the privacy policy documents published by the platform providers. They discourage sharing personal information, but people being unaware or in excitement keep on publishing their information, unknowingly making it leak out to the world. This value of information is humongous as it is profiled, and you are then presented offers, promotions, articles, freebies, credit cards and much more on such basis. This directly creates a daily disturbance in the form of unwanted phone calls, emails and so on.

With internet enabled gadgets, social media has virtually wrapped human vision, making it extremely difficult to avoid online activity.

4. Physical health issues: Continuously staring at the screen impacts your physical health. The light emitting from devices badly impact your eyes and eyesight, especially in dark when most of the people surf their mobiles while on bed. While being seated, your head is continuously turned downwards to your phone which can strain in your neck, back and spine. When you browse through social media during night, you tend to keep awake till late, and try to recover your sleep during morning hours. This is mostly difficult for working professionals, who finally end up being sleep deprived. Moreover, this results in lack of physical exercise, making your body gain weight, rise in issues like unstable blood pressure, thyroid, anxiety, and indigestion and sleep disorders.

5. Strained relationships: Families are facing this issue and the sad part is – without being realized. Almost all the members of a family are having some sort of devices, either laptops, desktops, tablets or mostly phones. In general, all the members of a family have got limited time to spend together, and social media eats up a larger part of their time. People feel connected, but it is all virtual. In practical, chit chats and family discussions are reducing. Anxiety of being connected to outer world, feeling of being shared and liked is stronger than feeling of being cared and caressed. Spouses, parents and children, students and teachers, friends and colleagues – all kinds of relationships are developing virtual closeness and being more mechanical than human.

There are many other negative impacts – both explicit and implicit to human health and sentiments. I would be writing more over such impacts and make you aware of the same in my upcoming stories. The need of hour is to moderate our social media time spent and normalize it in our life like other things rather than exaggerating. Stay tuned and I would post ways you can practice to reduce your online time consumption and come out of this phobia.

Let me know what is your thinking over these negatives, as well as write your own negative experiences of social media.